[Foundation-l] Ban and moderate

[Austin Hair]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I am listening, and do hear what you are saying, Fred. But banishment from
> something, whether it be from a working project or a country, means that
> person is being openly, or even surreptitiously, destructive of the body,
> the substance, of the project or country, not merely being critical of it.
> Has either of these persons, Greg or Peter, been destructive of the
> substance of the Project: the body of the Encyclopedia?

That is, in fact, exactly what we, the list administrators, finally concluded.

A minor correction, however: it was his contribution to the mailing
list we were assessing, not to Wikipedia or any other project.
(Though, given that he's been banned from at least two of them, that
would have been a much easier case to make.)

Greg Kohs went beyond being merely critical (which is welcome, and
even encouraged) to the point of being antisocial and
counterproductive.  He did so to such an extent that it was actively
preventing civil discourse.

> And could we please
> stop the disingenuousness of calling what is clearly censorship,
> "moderation"?

Moderation is the technical term for it, and and you can call it
"censorship" if you like, but your term carries an obvious bias.

I've been taking time out of my day to regularly log into the list
administration interface to make sure nobody's posts were
unnecessarily delayed, and I personally haven't rejected a single one
from Peter Damian so far.  I expect that we'll probably take him off
moderation soon, if only to relieve the burden on the administrators.

> And, when someone's constant (and seemingly only) answer to anyone who
> doesn't agree with them is to call them a name - like "troll", the
> accusation should bounce right back to the accuser. In psychology it's
> called "projection".

The funny thing about projection, of course, is that it's so easy to
call it out as recursive.

Austin